This application generally relates to communication systems, and more specifically to communication systems that include systems that allow a user to control how they participate in a communications event, including how they receive and send multimedia content.
Today there is an ever increasing demand for providing communication services that integrate both voice services, such as telephone calls, voice mail, and interactive voice response, with data services such as e-mail and personal information management. This desire for integrated voice and data services has driven the development of new telecommunication platforms that can handle voice and data being carried on both circuit switched and packet switched networks. These platforms can operate on digitized voice as well as conventional computer data to provide integrated services that allow customers to perform more sophisticated telecommunication techniques. For example, such systems can perform adaptive call forwarding, wherein a computer program responding to information carried on the packet switched network can adaptively forward a telephone call to predetermined customer premises equipment (CPE) according to a predetermined schedule that has been programmed into the platform. Such integrated voice and data services provide more powerful functions for allowing customers to communicate with each other.
Such integrated systems also facilitate communications events that are more complex than traditional voice calls and voice mail. For example, communications events today can employ multimedia data formats, involve the coordinated delivery of text, audio and video, and even extend across multiple different CPEs, such as handsets, workstations and personal digital assistants. Thus, although these new types of communications events provide powerful ways to exchange information, they are too complex to be serviced efficiently by traditional platforms and models for handling calls.
In particular, existing systems for allowing integrated voice and data services, and multimedia communications typically require each user to interact with the communications event in a predefined, or narrowly defined way, providing limited ability for the user to control how a call, or communications event will be received and handled, and providing little opportunity for extending the services that can be provided to a user. Additionally, existing systems, although capable of handling voice and data events, often provide limited coordination of real time and messaging communications events. Thus, existing systems tie users to particular devices and services, and fail to provide a user with a facile way to manage the services and equipment that are available to the user for handling a communications event.
Accordingly, there is a need to provide communications systems that provide a user with greater control over a communications event and that are more readily extended and scaled.
There is a further need for systems that provide a user with increased control over the systems and devices that can be employed during a communications event, including providing systems that give control over the media formats of a communications event.
There is still a further need to provide systems that more seamlessly integrate real-time communications events with messaging events.
The systems and methods described herein include a platform that employs a client/server architecture to provide an extensible set of real time and messaging communication services to a plurality of users. To this end, the platform architecture provides a customer centric model for processing a communications event, thus allowing a customer to control how the customer participates in a communications event. The platform allows the customer to configure and activate the services, thereby providing individual control over the communication services a customer receives. The platform includes a media server that interfaces to a circuit-switched network, such as the PSTN, as well as to a packet switched network, such as the Internet, to provide audio, video, and data communication services. The platform further includes an application server that acts as a client to the media server, and that coordinates a plurality of session processes, each of which can be associated with a particular customer. It will be seen that the systems described herein also provide a framework for developing communication services that can be deployed on the platform for extending the services available to a customer.
More particularly, the systems include an extensible client/server system for enabling the development of audio, video and data communication services. These systems comprise a media server for controlling hardware devices that interface communication networks, such as the public switched telephone network. The media server provides a plurality of resource objects each having a method and a data structure for controlling a hardware device to perform a communication function, and an object oriented client interface for organizing the objects into a set of application-level components for performing a communication operation. The system can further include an application server having an application framework that incorporates the resource objects to provide an extensible mechanism for interacting with communication operations being implemented on the hardware device.
More particularly, the system provides in one aspect methods for allowing a customer to control their participation in a communications event. These methods can comprise the steps of identifying a communications event that is associated with the customer, providing for that customer a session object capable of maintaining state information that is representative of the state of the customer""s communications events as well as being representative of control information provided by that specific customer; and providing a plurality of service objects, each being capable of providing a communications service for supporting the communications event, and each being responsive to the state information maintained within the session object. Accordingly, the session object operates as a control point for accessing the service objects and thereby for allowing the customer to configure selectively the support for the communications event the customer wishes. Moreover, as the session object maintains state information that the customer can alter, the customer is therefore provided with the opportunity to change state information during a communications event, thereby allowing the customer to change, even dynamically, how they participate in the communications event. For example, if the session object maintains state information that indicates that the customer wishes to receive telephone calls over a traditional handset, by changing the state information to change the end points employed (i.e., also known as resetting the control leg), the customer can now request that an ongoing telephone call be switched to a multimedia workstation, without interrupting the call. In a further practice, the state information can be employed by the system for modifying the behavior of two or more service objects to provide coordinated operation of the service objects. In this way, the state information can be employed to allow service objects to cooperate in providing services to the customer.
In a further practice, the methods of the invention include the steps of providing a customer profile object that has information which is representative of certain characteristics associated with a respective customer. These characteristics can include information that is representative of customer preferences which may be used to modify the behavior of the service objects. Customer preferences include, for example, the number of times the customer wishes a phone to ring before a call is transferred to voice mail, as well as other similar customer preferences.
The methods described herein also include providing a communications infrastructure for mapping calls associated with a customer to a communications structure that is capable of processing communication information associated with the calls. In this practice, a media server may be provided that has a plurality of resource objects, each of which is capable of allowing the service object to control a communication device that is capable of supporting the call. Communication devices include telephone handsets, multimedia PC""s, PBX systems, or any hardware or software communication device. The communications infrastructure can include a control leg object that is capable of mapping a call to a set of resource objects that may control a communication device, such as a telephone, to provide therefore a media pathway for coupling the customer to the call. The media pathway can be an audio pathway, a video pathway, a data pathway, a multimedia pathway or any pathway suitable for supporting the application at hand.
In one embodiment, the invention will be understood to provide methods that allow the system to access a set of resource objects that map the call to a plurality of different communication devices for providing a virtual multimedia communication terminal. Accordingly, the systems and methods described herein are hardware and software communication device independent, allowing a customer to leverage their already existing communication devices to provide high-level communication functionality.
In a further optional practice, the state information may be employed to identify a set of resource objects that map the call to a communication device selected by the customer. In a further alternative practice, the methods described herein provide a communications infrastructure that includes a call management object for mapping a call to a set of resource objects capable of offering the call as a member of a set of calls available to the customer. The communication infrastructure can further provide an incoming call agent that is capable of processing the state information of a session object to determine whether to attach a call to a call management object, to transfer the call to a predetermined location or device, to query the customer on how to handle the call or to block the call. Additionally, the communication infrastructure can also include a call recorder agent, capable of processing one or more media streams associated with the call and packaging the media stream or streams into an e-mail message for delivery to a mailbox associated with a customer. Additionally, the communication infrastructure can include a media translation agent capable of supporting cross-media translation, including real-time cross media translation, to translate a media stream associated with a call from a first format to a second format.
In a further practice, the methods described herein allow a customer to create a connection object that is capable of allowing the customer to interact with the session object. The connection object provides a channel object that is capable of acting as a media pathway between a communication device employed by the customer and the service object. In this way, the customer can interact through the channel object with the service object, which can be an interactive voice service.
In a further aspect, the invention will be understood as systems for allowing a customer to control their participation in a communications event. These systems comprise a media server that has a plurality of resource objects, each being capable of providing control over a communication device, and an application server for supporting a communication application, having a service object capable of interfacing with the resource objects and connecting the resource objects into a structure for supporting the communications event. Accordingly, it will be understood that the systems described herein are extensible in that new services are readily added into the system and connected together to provide new communication services for the customers.